


The Dollmaker’s House

by Yenneffer



Category: Compilation of Final Fantasy VII, Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII, Final Fantasy VII Remake (Video Game 2020), Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children
Genre: Angst, Growing Up, Loss of Limbs, M/M, Puppets, Sefikura Week, Warning: Hojo (Compilation of FFVII)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-27
Updated: 2021-01-27
Packaged: 2021-03-13 11:15:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,241
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29027793
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Yenneffer/pseuds/Yenneffer
Summary: During the day, they were bound to listen and obey their master’s whims.Until they weren’t.Puppet Day for Sefikura Week 2021
Relationships: Sephiroth/Cloud Strife
Comments: 4
Kudos: 22
Collections: Sefikura (Sephiroth/Cloud) Week - Yearly Event





	The Dollmaker’s House

**Author's Note:**

> Puppet day and Sefikura? How could anyone resist :)

“Hello,” the character greeted, polite. “Who are you?”

“Why, we’re your friends!” exclaimed the louder presence. He was all red, lively gestures, and earrings glinting in the blaze of the new day. He was all loud.

The character the master called sephiroth (“What is a “sephiroth”?” It had asked, confused, to no answer but a dismissive wave of a hand.) was the opposite; pale colours, it thought it appeared almost an apparition in the light of the day, dull sounds, mechanical motions. It gazed placidly at the crimsons and sanguines pulsing with life as Friends turned to engage the other character who hadn’t spoken yet. That was the first stirring of envy, still unnamed at the moment. It wanted the colours too.

“My name is Angeal,” said the up-till-now silent character. “And this,” he added, shaking off the red-clad arm that rested leisurely on his shoulders, “is Genesis. We’re your welcoming committee. What’s your name?”

It paused, deliberating. “I don’t know. How do you get a name?”

“Well, you receive it, of course! It’s a gift!” Genesis exclaimed, combing back his red hair with a lazy flick of a wrist.

“Gift? From whom?” the character wanted to know.

“From the goddess!”

Angeal swatted Genesis over the head and rolled his eyes. It looked well-practiced. Not choreographed like everything that the character had known.

“Don’t listen to this nutter,” he said, fondly. “Mothers give names.”

“Who is my mother?”

Genesis scoffed. “How are we to know? The one who gave birth to you, obviously!”

There was a lot of giving, the character noticed. If everything is given, then where do the givers receive it?

“Genesis, be kind!” Angeal admonished the red-head. But he did not add anything to the explanation.

“I have a creator,” divulged the character, as a peace-offering. The silence was turning oppressive, and the pair of eyes on it was more revealing than the brightness of the sun. “Hojo made me.”

“Pfft!” Genesis made a rude gesture and scowled. “That one’s not a goddess, for certain!”

“He doesn’t qualify as a mother, either,” Angeal agreed.

“I do not know anyone else,” the character defended itself, surveying their surroundings. If only it could find a shadow to hide in, to not accentuate its grotesque gauntness. Up till now it had no one to compare itself to, to realise it was lacking. “Hojo called me a “sephiroth”, do you know what that is?” it asked, hopefully.

“Hmm,” Angeal mused, elbowing Genesis when he opened his mouth. The character wondered what words would never be spoken, now. “That’s the first I’ve heard the term. It must be your name!” He brightened up, pleased at having resolved their first issue. “It’s very nice to meet you, Sephiroth!”

Angeal approached to shake its hand. It felt weird, the texture of another’s skin rough against its, the tanned palm outlined against Sephiroth’s (a name! it had a name!) pasty one.

“Pleasure,” Genesis waved lazily, a crooked smile curved on his face. “Well, it seems we have another man, again, so this should be a breeze! No one knows where the ladies’ quarters are supposed to be,” he explained, misinterpreting, upon seeing Sephiroth glance his way questioningly.

“I am a man?”

Angeal was too late to elbow his friend as he threw his head back and laughed. Sephiroth stared, drinking in the movement. It should have been awkward, head hung back as if on cut threads. It wasn’t.

“If you’d rather we refer to you as a woman, that’s okay,” Angeal said.

Genesis chuckled.

“Of course that’s okay, but my dear Angeal, I highly doubt that’s the issue at hand here! That bastard Hojo,” he grinned. “He put you in the book without giving you any backstory, huh? A clean slate.” He snorted in disgust and grinned, showing too many teeth. “That fucking bastard.”

Shaking his head, Genesis strode over to Sephiroth, grabbed the lapels of its jacket and pulled them apart, exposing the chest. Sephiroth blinked down at him, perplexed as the red-head smacked the pectoral muscles beneath.

The clap sounded loud in the tranquil air, startling Angeal and Sephiroth. Genesis barrelled straight over it.

“See? Flat chest. I won’t check your pants, but by the overall design, I’d say biologically you’re a man. You can use the he/him pronouns. Hojo probably left you at it?” He guessed, and waited to see Sephiroth nod. “We can talk more about gender and the choices you have later if you wish. Let’s not be too confusing on your first day – we’re running out of time as it is.”

Angeal swore under his breath, and both he and Genesis looked up. The sunny sky was now overcast by heavy-looking clouds, tumescent with rain.

“Quick, he’s waking up!”

Angeal grabbed Sephiroth by the shoulder and dragged him behind himself and Genesis as they dashed away.

To their positions. Their wet perches, as Genesis would bitterly call it in the weeks to come. Hojo always made it rain in Wutai.

***

Time ran like the river for the three characters. During the day, they did as Hojo bid them. They fought. They were hateful and spiteful, and bathed in the blood of their enemies. At night, when Hojo slept, they were free to do as they wished. Genesis liked to read, and his voice – loud and brash during the day – quieted down as he quoted his favourite passages to the other two. Angeal enjoyed gardening, and getting his hands dirty with something other than blood. He admitted he liked cultivating tiny things, bashful as he indicated his overly large frame.

Sephiroth did not know what he liked to do during the night. It was enough that he was with friends.

Genesis and Angeal were originally creations stolen from another author. Hojo hated Hollander, they whispered, a secret that wasn’t a secret. During the days Sephiroth saw: lost duels, grotesque wounds, painful visits to the doctors who gleefully said there was nothing to be done, and finally, degradation.

At nights he apologised.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Genesis retorted. His arm was bleeding still from beneath the bandage, healing slowly now that it wasn’t made to not heal. “It wasn’t you; we agreed, didn’t we, that what we do during the day stays there?”

Sephiroth nodded. They had agreed. It was hard to remember when he somehow ended up undamaged despite Hojo’s cruelties, while the other two suffered from lingering injuries. He was Hojo’s perfect creation, the author couldn’t have him be tarnished. Couldn’t have him have friends, so all his words during the day were colder and sharper than Masamune’s steel. So at night, when his words and actions were his again, he apologised.

They stood in companionable silence and watched Angeal tend to his plot of land. Hojo had them battle each other earlier and they had thrashed through the plants, leaving devastation after their heavy boots. Angeal was trying to recover what he could; it wasn’t much, the silver-haired man noticed with a pang.

Rinse, repeat. Once more.

Sephiroth grew to hate the golden sun.

It got worse.

The first time Hojo decided to prove his creation’s superiority over Hollander’s, he had Sephiroth pierce his friends’ hearts with Masamune.

He watched, dazed, as a bloody river burst out of Genesis’ chest. The man choked, gurgled. Stilled. He was full of crimsons and sanguines, again, always. Full of life, only no more.

The spray of blood hit Sephiroth in the face, splattered his silver hair, ran down over cheeks and into his mouth. As he’d once wished, he was no longer all pale colours; he had the red now too.

Angeal, if possible, was even worse. He fought, as dictated by Hojo, but also exercised what will he could to step into Masamune’s swing, staring at Sephiroth apologetically as his eyes dimmed. Sephiroth had no time to prepare himself, to brace for the impact of his friend’s body hanging off his sword.

One moment, they were fighting. The next, he alone was alive.

Dusk could not come soon enough.

That first night, Genesis did not interrupt Sephiroth’s apology. He stared listlessly into the fire in the little home they all shared, not even opening the book he was clutching to his chest.

Angeal was outside, gardening or pretending to. It was getting too dark to see, they should install lamps for him outside.

Then it happened again, Hojo not satisfied with the scene kept re-writing and re-writing, a draft after draft of fighting and dying, all ending up in the bin.

All being lived through, day after day.

Time moved like the river, meandering between day and night. They acclimated. Genesis was harsh and brittle during the day, and read them tragedies out loud at night. Angeal took to a newly arrived character, a student named Zack in need of cultivating not unlike his plants. Sephiroth cut off their heads and burnt them alive and scrubbed his bloody hands raw in the shower.

Then he made dinner.

Break, repeat.

Then, the scene changed. It showed Sephiroth’s superiority in every angle, but did not show the other characters’ inferiority. Why have him lift a hand to win, if they could defeat themselves?

This time, Genesis fell. Angeal pleaded with his student to kill him.

Sephiroth told one to rot and sent Zack to deal with the other.

He moved out that night.

***

Sephiroth first saw Cloud as the day broke into night. He was passing a group of infantrymen when Hojo’s gaze slid off their world, and one of them took off the unwieldy helmet. A shock of gold hair sprang out from beneath it and caught the last rays of the sun. He recoiled at the bright colour and coldly stared down the overly friendly infantryman who waved at him, watched as the smile vanished from his young face as his own remained unmoved.

“Come on, Cloud,” another trooper tugged at the blond’s shoulder, steering him away. “No one gets a response out of that one these days.”

He didn’t stay to watch them leave for the night, but his perfect hearing caught them mention “poker night” and “zack’s place”.

Fairly easy to avoid, then. Out of sight, out of mind.

Sephiroth ignored the ache in his chest at the friendly gesture. He had learnt from the past mistakes: isolation was for the best.

Cloud refused to stay out of sight.

Suddenly, wherever Sephiroth looked, there was that bright hair again. In daylight, in his office to deliver papers. In the cafeteria, making faces at the unpalatable fish and oily fries. Standing at attention guarding a particularly unimpressive door and leaning back leisurely when the officers passed.

But always, meeting Sephiroth’s eyes and holding his gaze.

He grew paranoid and took to checking the corridors both ways in the Shinra Tower before stalking to the next axis point on his chosen path. He never lingered anymore. His fingers kept twitching to his sword’s pommel, always on guard. His cool self-assurance held during the day, by a hair’s breadth.

Night was a different matter.

Cloud was everywhere, too, a brilliant presence against the sea of smudged faces in the dark. Sephiroth was the spectre that wandered on the edges of groups gathering periodically after dark to celebrate the freedoms offered them, watching people drinking, laughing and playing games – watching Cloud, and imagined what it would be like to stand by his side, listening to the cadence of his voice from close by rather than strain to distinguish it from the rumbling cacophony.

He left when Zack dragged Cloud over to his corner, to sit by the figures Sephiroth was constantly aware of while studiously averting his eyes.

The next day, he walked over to where Cloud’s squad was practicing drills and ordered him to accompany him as his assistant for the day, and suppressed an excited thrill he felt at ignoring the heavy regard from above.

“Will it be all, sir?” Cloud asked, tone conscientious but eyes dancing with mirth. So far, he’d been ordered to move things in Sephiroth’s office only to move them back into their original place after Sephiroth had decided the new arrangement made the space disconcerting. He’d also watered the plants before informing Sephiroth that they were fake and did not, in fact, need to be watered.

Sephiroth’s smile tightened. “Not at all. You’ll accompany me to today’s meetings and make notes.”

Sephiroth had an impeccable memory and never forgot a thing. Not that what was said at board meetings was of any consequence. Hojo wrote them to highlight how intelligent scientists were compared to other departments.

“You want me to fold them into cranes too?”

“Pardon?” Sephiroth levelled the trooper with a hard gaze.

Cloud looked back, unapologetic. “Nothing, sir. Just seems like an equally effective use of the paper.” Or my time, his arched eyebrow suggested.

“I don’t like cranes. Make parrots if you have to amuse yourself. Unless they’re too hard for you?”

“Nothing’s too hard for me.”

Sephiroth dismissed Cloud once the interminably long meetings of the day were over, a foul taste in his mouth after having agreed with a greasy scientist that what the Company needed to prosper was more human subjects for experimentation. He was glad Hojo at least spared him a visit to the labs this time.

He trained alone, and dined alone. When he returned back to his office before the end of the day, he found a lopsided paper parrot sitting on his desk. Next to it was an innocuous-looking note.

_His name is Sephiroth._

Above it were Cloud’s notes from today’s meetings – doodles of Khodżo, the scientist. The buttons on his huge belly were threatening to pop off, there was cartoonish spit flying out of his mouth as he spoke gibberish. His arms were short and unable to reach an apple marked “for the best” hanging over his rotund figure.

Suppressing a smile, Sephiroth folded the note and put it in his pocket. The poorly-made parrot he took to the cabinet.

When he opened its doors, a mass of paper cranes fell onto his head.

This time, he couldn’t help himself: he laughed out loud, standing alone in his office surrounded by a mess of origami birds.

A week later, Hojo wrote about monsters spawning from a reactor in Nibelheim. Soon, dawn greeted a small troop of infantrymen and SOLDIERs making their way north to the tiny village that had not been on the map before.

Cloud, Sephiroth and Zack were in that group.

“It’s weird,” Cloud had remarked the night before to Sephiroth. They were cooking together. Cloud cut the vegetables unevenly and Sephiroth meticulously amended the rough pieces. Cloud elbowed Sephiroth aside to taste the stew and added more seasoning, to Sephiroth’s annoyed double-checking of the recipe. They made it work. “I’ve never heard of the place before, and yet I _know_ I was born there. I don’t remember anything about it except that if not for my mother or Tifa, I’d have hated it. I know this Tifa is important to me, but I have no idea why or what she even _looks_ like. She could ask me for the time and I wouldn’t even realise it.”

“Faulty backstory?”

“Don’t I know it! I didn’t even realise I had a name until Zack was asking me about it, I was just one of the troopers, and then I wasn’t. Freaky. I’m grateful that Hojo doesn’t give a shit about me, but all this stuff that’s blank until suddenly it isn’t on his say-so weirds me out.”

Now, as they stood at the gates of the tiny town, Sephiroth sent Cloud to visit his mother. Later they would all go to explore the reactor.

Sephiroth didn’t care about Jenova or the fact that he was made to be a perfect monster. Only right now he did because Hojo did.

He stalked the library like a leashed cat, face alight with the eureka of discovery. His mother, caged by puny humans, unworthy to look at her. Traitors, traitors.

He wished for nightfall, to cuddle with Cloud and sip sweetened tea from a shared cup while the short blond dug his elbows in Sephiroth’s side as he made himself more comfortable.

But there was enough daylight still to do more.

The fire scorched his coat and sizzled at his palms, but it did not burn him. Instead the vibrant flame gorged its hungry maw on the town, made of dry wood, and its people, made of pliable flesh. It burned all the same.

Back at the reactor Sephiroth left bloody footprints on the stairs leading to Jenova’s glass case. He barely felt it, shocked, when the giant sword went through his chest – pain bloomed only after he threw Cloud away, an aftertaste of the giant wound. He staggered over to the blond, stabbed him.

Lifting him up on Masamune’s seemingly impossible length, he looked into Cloud’s blue, blue eyes, expecting to see resignation and pain, and Hojo’s will. In his mind Sephiroth started apologising already, and cleaning his hands. Just a bit more till it was night-time.

Instead the blood-shot blue was full of stubborn resolve. Cloud snarled and gritted his teeth and dragged his body-weight down the sword to find purchase. To find balance.

 _I’m not going to go down alone. I won’t let you win._ It was a promise.

With a grunt of effort, Cloud heaved and threw Sephiroth down, down, long way down into the mako.

When the night fell, Cloud was nowhere to be found. Sephiroth asked around about him, getting nothing but non-committal grunts in reply. Finally Zack took pity, seeing his increasingly frantic searches.

“He doesn’t want to be found, right now. Give him time, I’m sure he just needs some space to settle down. That was some deep shit Hojo pulled this time,” the younger SOLDIER said, shaking his head and waving away Sephiroth’s apology for injuring him earlier. “Wasn’t my first rodeo, man. It’s fine.”

Only, time didn’t matter when you revisited the same wounds over and over again. The next time Sephiroth and Cloud met, it was again during daylight. Sephiroth said his lines in the library, and Cloud said his.

Hojo was heading towards an ending where Sephiroth emerged victorious, with Cloud just another meaningless victim of his dominion. Cloud’s hot gaze said he had other plans.

Sephiroth tracked him down at twilight after that.

Cloud was staring at the vast dark sky, head tilted back. He pulled his lips down when Sephiroth cleared his throat to get his attention, but did not turn around to face him.

“It’s all one constellation,” Cloud said, bitterly.

Sephiroth came closer to stand by his side. He could almost feel the warmth of his body in the crisp winter air, so close. So far. “The stars?”

“The stars, the story. All of it.”

“Hojo—”

“Screw Hojo!” Cloud whirled around, stabbing a finger into Sephiroth’s chest, strategically in-between his coat’s lapels. His cold finger scorched Sephiroth’s bare chest. “You’re the one who did this. We’re doing all of this. I’m so sick and tired,” he bit out, “of excuses. You burned down my hometown, my mother. You can’t sweep it under the rug. I won’t let you – I’ve only just got to meet her! And then she was deep-fried!”

“She’s fine now—” Sephiroth started. He’d seen her, alive, from afar. She’d been the one he had not asked about Cloud’s whereabouts.

“She’s still died in that fire! Maybe Hojo’s to blame, but you’re still the one who’s done this!”

“He has the power when he’s awake.”

“Maybe it’s time he stopped being awake then.”

“How?”

“I don’t know. But you have to try to fight him. You haven’t even tried,” Cloud accused, sounding weary.

Sephiroth felt weary too. But at least Cloud let him stand with him and stargaze for the rest of the night. He was grateful – he’d missed the little things they did. They remained still for hours, content to be. Just before the dawn broke and announced a new day, Sephiroth took Cloud’s hand in his. It was cold to the touch, but that was all right. Sephiroth was colder still.

It didn’t last long.

A clash of steel, jeering words, and a furious roar.

_You’re nothing but a puppet._

_You killed my friend!_

Somehow, despite Hojo’s wishes, despite everything that suggested Sephiroth should’ve won their duels... he just didn’t.

Time after time, having every advantage on his side... and he still lost.

Hojo gave him a wing. Cloud jumped up after him using every crevice, every ledge, every piece of crumbling concrete to reach him, to fight him.

To defeat him.

_You don’t get it, do you? There is nothing that I don’t cherish._

Cloud was not meant to win any of their fights. He refused to back down and cower, and against his very design, won every single one.

_You’re the puppet, not me._

Cloud’s will to win was his own. Sephiroth sometimes wondered if he had any will at all, no matter if it was day or night.

“I don’t want to kill you,” Cloud whispered one night, after another pointless fight. He’d cut off Sephiroth’s sword arm this time, and now sat helplessly pressing the severed limb into the bleeding stump.

“Leave it,” Sephiroth grunted. “It’ll heal on its own.”

“Not the point, Sephiroth.”

“It’s all right. You don’t have to apologise.”

“I’m _not_. It’s either you or countless others. Maybe all. Doesn’t change that I don’t want to be the one to do it.”

“Hojo—”

“Blast Hojo!” Cloud exploded. It felt like deja vu. They’d been here before. Everything kept looping back and forth. “It’s not Hojo making me do it, _I_ don’t care what he wants! It’s you. I don’t want you to have this hangdog expression again, from when we first met. You’re the one making me kill you. _Stop_.”

Sephiroth blinked. Reconsidered. “Huh.”

He got a well-deserved swat on the head for that one. With a flat of Cloud’s sword.

“That was unnecessary,” he complained, reaching his left hand to massage the spot where Cloud had hit him. Wrong arm, the stump was too short to reach. Weird, he felt like the rest of the arm was still there, attached at the end. “How do we stop him? It’s not like we can drug him to sleep forever.”

“If there’s anything I’ve learnt— it’s that we can’t do it alone.” Cloud stood up, gently placed Sephiroth’s arm amid the rubble, and helped the taller man stand. Sephiroth wobbled, finding his balance to be off, and Cloud offered his shoulder to steady him. His arm for Cloud’s shoulder, then. A fair trade.

***

“That’s bold,” Angeal stated, pouring Cloud and Sephiroth their tea.

“But necessary.” Cloud nodded in thanks and added generous heaps of sugar to both his and Sephiroth’s cups. He stirred, laughing under his breath at Zack taking pictures with Sephiroth doing various one-armed hero poses.

Genesis’s eyes had locked on Cloud the moment he put forth their idea, and refused to move an inch. They’d played poker often enough; they knew each other’s tells. Cloud refused to back down, not in this.

“What makes you think this will work?” the red-head asked.

“Why not?” It was Sephiroth who answered, looking at his once-friend. Maybe again, one day. But this wasn’t what it was about. “What do we have to lose? We’ve all died.”

“If you yet haven’t learnt that there are worse fates than death than I despair of you, my friend,” Genesis retorted. He crossed his arms. “Okay, then. Say we follow this devil-may-care attitude. Why me?”

“Why not?” Zack, it seemed, had decided to join their side and neglected to inform his roommates. “You always have a book up your sleeve. Even when you don’t wear any sleeves, which, _man_. Impressive.”

Cloud leaned forward and took Sephiroth’s hand in his own. “The next time Hojo starts writing about the end of the world, I’ll not kill Sephiroth,” he declared, in his quiet but sure way. Squeezed Sephiroth’s hand. “And what happens to everyone once the final draft is done and the book ends? You ask, why you; I could ask the same thing. _But who else is there?_ ”

Stunned, Genesis nodded. And then threw his head back and laughed. Somewhere in the background, Zack cheered and grabbed a bottle of champagne.

They all woke up the next day, groggy and pained. On the floor laid strewn numerous pages filled with Genesis’s scribbles – his usual elegant calligraphy lopsided after they poured hard liquor into their champagne glasses. Cloud groaned where he was lying cuddled next to Sephiroth and grabbed some of his fine long hair to cover his eyes. The sun was blazing through the window straight into his skull.

“Zack, if you don’t stop breathing so loud, I will be forced to annihilate you,” Sephiroth murmured to the room at large, letting Cloud tug his face closer.

“Did it work?” Angeal wondered. “Maybe we shouldn’t have celebrated before the actual fact.”

_We’ll write Hojo into the book. And we’ll put him on trial for everything he’s done to us. Every little thing. No mercy. You’ll write it._ Cloud had said as he barrelled into the little home with barely a knock, dragging bemused Sephiroth by the hand. He was looking at the red Genesis, but Sephiroth only had eyes for Cloud, golden in the setting sun.


End file.
